The climate challenges we’re facing require new ways of thinking, new ways of acting, and new ways of creating value. We’re all part of the solution but business must play a key role in defining and delivering this future state, as business has the resources, the ambition and the expertise to drive actions and outcomes that balance the economic and environmental needs of society. Specifically, business must deliver sustainable results that decouple economic growth from environmental impacts. But how?

Innovation is at the core of making major leaps forward. Just as the ability to work with metals brought about the end of the Stone Age and the ability to store and manipulate data brought in the Information Age, now we must think about new ways to meet our societal needs without impacting the planet.

Consider Bubble Wrap®, for example. It was Sealed Air’s original innovation that changed the way we think about protecting fragile goods. It was a new concept that didn’t look like anything we had seen before. A simple packaging innovation has resulted in the protection of countless shipments that make their way to our homes every day.

Now we need to deliver new innovations that solve new global challenges: unsustainable consumption of water and energy resources, waste of food and manufactured goods through spoilage and damage, and unhygienic environments that limit human productivity and health. For these we need new solutions that build upon harnessing knowledge based systems that integrate with physical goods and processes.

This week, Sealed Air announced a partnership with the World Wildlife Fund’s Climate Savers program to mitigate the impacts of climate change. This is a strong commitment to leverage our innovative solutions to reduce resource consumption within our industry and a call to action across our value chain to embrace transformational change.

Additionally, this will help us demonstrate how our innovative solutions can create sustainable value for customers and consumers, while reducing dependence on resources. We plan to be a catalyst within our industry to accelerate the overall pace of change to achieve our vision, which is “to create a better way for life.” Now that is a commitment that can make us all proud.